How People Leader Hebba Youssef Streamlines the HR Tech Stack to Drive Business Outcomes with ChartHop

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Discover how ChartHop helped Hebba:

• Bring transparency and clarity to the employee experience
• Integrate data from multiple sources and blend it into one platform
• Save hours of time previously spent organizing data in spreadsheets

Hebba Youssef is a passionate People leader with a focus on empowering her team with solutions to support their people and help the business improve. She has led Talent and People teams in various industries, including enterprise analytics, mobility software and new media. Most recently, she was Head of People for a financial platform that creates payment cards to enable and control spending to make digital payments safer and easier for everyone.

While in this role, Hebba sought an HR solution that would allow the People Ops team to get the most out of their people data in an easy way and deliver actionable insights for better business decisions.

Consolidating HR tools to improve access to data

Setting out to find a performance management tool to complement the PEO her team had in place led Hebba to so much more. What she got was a comprehensive platform that empowered the People Ops team with better access to data and provided employees with visibility into their performance and the org as a whole.

Having used a performance management tool coupled with an employee engagement tool on top of an HRIS in a role prior to this one, Hebba knew this time around she needed a single solution that also had a robust people analytics offering. She’d heard positive reviews about ChartHop through her network and jumped at the opportunity to bring the People Operations Platform to the current HR tech stack. She says, “I kept thinking to myself, it’s so annoying to have to pull from all these different systems. And so when I was looking at ChartHop and saw that it integrates data from our existing apps and tools into one place, it was a no-brainer.”

And the outcome of that no-brainer decision? According to Hebba, “The average HR team uses nine systems. With ChartHop, that nine could become one or two. Here, we’re only in our PEO for payroll and benefits. Our only other systems for anything employee related are ChartHop and Gather [ChartHop acquired Gather in March 2022]. We use the ChartHop and Gather platforms to bring transparency and clarity to the employee experience with manager 1:1s, performance evaluations, internal user guides, the org chart and more.”

ChartHop helped Hebba

• Reduce the number of solutions needed from an average of 9 to just 2
• Spend under 5 minutes pulling a report which previously took a few hours in Excel
• Position HR as a strategic driver of business outcomes with data-driven insights

From piecemeal functionality to a people analytics smörgåsbord

Fewer point solutions doesn’t mean reduced capabilities. In fact, Hebba and the People Ops team found the opposite to be true.

Hebba points to her past experiences using a dedicated performance management tool. She found they were always missing the critical piece that connects the data from that solution with the data living in a PEO. And while features kept getting added, the reports still came up short.

An all-in-one platform has erased those issues. Hebba says: “What drew me to ChartHop was that I could actually take all the data and blend it. It wasn’t just performance data, it was performance data plus engagement data. Then there was the ability to look at performance data, engagement data, and compensation data all together to inform reviews.”

Having this blend of data from different inflection points of the employee lifecycle has changed the way in which Hebba works. Previously, she had to pull data from multiple sources and compile it into different spreadsheets to try to get the insights she needed. Now with ChartHop, all the information is already in one place and she can pull a single report, easily including the columns of data that she wants to see and removing those she doesn’t.

Citing a specific example of how this impacted her day-to-day, Hebba recounts, “I spent a few hours in our PEO one day trying to pull a report and trying to write formulas in Excel. I thought, ‘Why am I doing this?’ I went to ChartHop and I pulled it in under five minutes. That’s what makes ChartHop a differentiator from all the other solutions.”

And it’s not just Hebba getting time back in her day. Before implementing ChartHop, the entire People Ops team would often find themselves spending hours in an attempt to get the right information in the right format. Because they were trying to get data to match across systems, even something as simple as first name and last name might be formulated differently depending on the source, resulting in time spent altering columns in spreadsheets.

“We were building the Frankenstein of the information we were trying to see. With ChartHop, we don’t have to do that anymore because it pulls data directly from our other systems and puts it into the same format. It makes it really easy.”

A trusted voice to the exec team, better support for all

In preparation for an upcoming review cycle, Hebba needed to identify which employees had received a performance merit increase from the previous cycle and what the exact percentage increase was.

Once again, she was able to visualize and simplify the data quickly with ChartHop’s user-friendly reports to find the answer. Hebba shares: “I built our philosophy for what our merit and performance increases would look like in under an hour using ChartHop. When presenting the plan to our CEO and CFO, I was able to deliver all the data that informed this philosophy in a clear and easy to understand package.”

This is just one example of how ChartHop has helped Hebba better prepare for leadership meetings, where she’s responsible for not only supporting the executive team, but also advocating for all employees. It’s a tough job, but armed with solid data and actionable insights, she’s well-positioned to do it. She adds, “People leaders wear multiple hats all day long: sales, data, support, growth, therapy, performance coaching. We do all of these different things, and if I didn’t have ChartHop, I would be flying blind.”

Backing up feelings with facts to measure business outcomes

Now with easy access to people data, Hebba can back up her finely tuned intuition when it comes to employee engagement and satisfaction with hard facts and figures.

Hebba stresses the importance of People leaders being data-driven to measure progress and make business decisions. Explaining why this is important beyond just the HR function, she says, “Ultimately, as much as everyone wants to say they drive the business outcomes, it’s your people that drive that outcome. And being able to measure their success and engagement will tell you how successful you will be as a company.”

She elaborates, “In this job you need really high emotional intelligence and you have to be able to sense the things that nobody else can. But having the data to back that up makes me just as credible as my other counterparts, like our Revenue team leader who always comes to the table with concrete metrics. ChartHop has given me the power to not only say ‘I feel,’ but that I see very tangibly and here’s the data behind it.”

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